About NASC

Stock Catalogue

Transcriptomics

NASC Data And Webservices

NASC provides programmatic access to various data resources and analysis tools via Webservice technologies. Webservices technologies enable integration and inter-operation between client and server software. The technology is built on open standards: Representational state transfer (REST): a software architecture style. Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP): a messaging protocol for transporting information. Web Service Description Language (WSDL): a method for describing Webservices and their capabilities.
A list and description of Webservices provided by NASC follows:

Germplasm Webservices

Seed Stocks

The NASC stock catalogue holds over 800,000 accessions of Arabidopsis thaliana.
This includes a wealth of characterised mutants and multiple markers; a wide variety of enhancer and promoter trap lines (both GUS and GFP), suitable for expression
studies; several mapping populations and hundreds of ecotypes, which are of particular interest to post genomic research and offer a reservoir of natural genetic variation.
Collections from the SALK Institute, GABI-Kat, Syngenta SAIL T-DNA, Wisc DS Lox, John Innes Centre together with the IMA (Institute for Molecular Agrobiology) lines from Singapore and
similar lines from the CSHL (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) constitute a very large number of sequenced characterised insertion lines suitable for reverse genetics. Data
associated with NASC stocks are available via webservices.

Ontologies

In an effort to augment the depth and quality of the data, NASC has utilised various ontologies and standards, giving the research community a controlled and
structured vocabulary to describe and represent their data. NASC has adopted the Plant Ontology in its Germplasm database to structure and
annotate its phenotypic descriptions. These immediately benefit the plant research community by allowing users to query the database via webservices using defined terminologies.

Soaplab2 Webservices

NASC has used SOAPLab to deploy most of its webservices. See the NASC SOAP services link for a list of all NASC SOAP webservices.

SOAPLab ships with its own client, SPINET, where webservices can be tested using a browser. This page - NASC SOAP services - is provided mainly as a link to available NASC webservices, a brief description of what each one does, and an example input that can be used. There is also WSDL link alongside each service name.

RESTful Webservices

NASC's RESTful webservices API allows access to the NASC stock catalog and related data, via a set of URLs with a fixed pattern showed below. The query parameters are shown in curly brackets. The results of the webservices are returned in JSON format for simple consumption. NASC RESTful services will also help to meet integration requirements for large cross continental projects such as the Arabidopsis Information Portal that build systems where data can be easily combined and extended.

REST features include:

Client-Server: clients act as interfaces to server based services

Stateless: each request must contain all the information required to interpret the request

Cache: response data can be marked as cacheable or non-cacheable allowing use of caching at server, client or intermediate proxies.

Manipulation of resources through representations: requests and responses are representations of objects (e.g. HTML or XML documents)

These features are part of the HTTP design, thus HTTP can be considered a REST protocol and REST services are based on HTTP. Using URLs to identify resources, MIME types to identify types of data representation and using requests that contain all the state required to process the request.

The data returned by a RESTful service can be in a variety of MIME formats. NASC data is currently returned in standard JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format.